Rex Jaeschke's Personal Blog

Είναι όλα ελληνικά για μένα. Okay, got that? Just in case your Greek is a little rusty, according to https://translate.google.com, it's the title of this essay written in Greek. That statement is often used in English to suggest that something is not understandable. That is, "For all the sense it made, it might as well have been written in Greek!"

According to Wikipedia, "The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the first alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. It is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Apart from its use in writing the Greek language, in both its ancient and its modern forms, the Greek alphabet today also serves as a source of technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics, science and other fields."

For those of us whose only alphabet is the Latin one used by English and other western languages, like other alphabets, the Greek alphabet is just another set of symbols with corresponding sounds. As such, if you insist on confusing yourself when trying to follow it, you surely will! [If you've been following my "What is Normal?" series, you'll know that one person's normal can vary widely from another's.]

More than 45 years ago, for four years in high school, I was a student of mathematics, physics, and chemistry, so I was exposed to Greek letters on a regular basis. Now I apologize to those of you who are still in therapy over those classes, but do the symbols π, α, β, Δ, θ, and λ look at least a little bit familiar? Hopefully, you remember the first one, the humble pi (pun intended)! For more information than you probably want to know about such symbols, click here.

The Cyrillic alphabet, as used by modern-day Russian and the languages of a number of Slavic countries, is derived from Greek. It came from Greece via Bulgaria, and is named after Saint Cyril, who was involved in creating an earlier alphabet.

In this essay, we'll look at how various Greek letters still influence the daily lives of many people outside Greece. In particular, we'll mention how Greek letters feature prominently in university life in the US, in college fraternity and sorority names.

Support for lambda functions (or closures) are becoming more prevalent in computer programming languages

Lambda calculus

[Under the Soviets, St. Petersburg was called Leningrad. While there in 1992, I recall seeing "mileposts" leading to/from that city showing Λxx, where xx was the number of kilometers to/from Leningrad.]

Greek letters also appear in popular culture phrases or designations such as Delta Force, the US Army's special detachment used to bring about change in our best interests. Also, the TV series Alpha House, which is a political satire about a house shared in Washington DC by Republican Senators.

In my high school in rural South Australia, students were divided into four so-called houses, which competed against each other, primarily in sporting events. Alpha house's color was yellow, Beta's was blue, Gamma's was green, and Delta's was red. I was in Alpha house.

When moving from Australia to the US in 1979, my unlimited-stopover, open-use, airline ticket included a leg from Bombay, India, to Athens, Greece, and then onto Rome, Italy. Unfortunately, when I was ready to leave Bombay, there was no space available on flights to Athens for nearly a week, so I elected to bypass Greece and go straight to Italy. Now, 37 years later, I still haven't been to Greece. C'est la vie, or perhaps I should say, Έτσι είναι η ζωή.

Add comment

News and Information

After my 5-week sojourn to Australia, it took two full weeks to get over the jetlag. Along the way, spring arrived, then departed, and then came back, but just for a few days! As Mark Twain famously said, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it!"